So often they seem beyond belief, the yarns that are spun around town and around dinner tables, late in the night or in passing on the street. They are mostly told secondhand. Or third. Stories from the family lore too wild to think they could have actually happened, and so exciting and colorful we would hardly want to live in a world where they couldn’t.

Often a delightful dubiousness is added to these tales by the distance they traveled to reach our ears, the wine, and the festive manner of telling. This was not the case on the summery night when our friend, acclaimed 78 collector and producer Christopher King, shared with us his family fables. His were told firsthand, and with demonstrations to help us picture the action.

“Did we tell you how our daughter, Riley, was born?” He asked us later, nonchalant as he cleared our plates. After the stories his family had already shared, of ceiling snakes and hatchets and the town where they live in Virginia, we knew this legend, saved for last, must be the best one.

The purpose of the Long Gone Sound Series is not didactic in nature nor scholarly in scope. Rather, the goal of this venture is to create a catalyst for musical and cultural transformation. We are providing an aperture through which the curious can enter and emerge either famished or full. This is an attempt to capture, if just fleetingly, a discrete frequency in the spectrum of our fading sounds, an audio complement to “Specters Of The Spectrum.”

Christopher King is a re-mastering engineer, producer, and author. He specializes in pre-war rural American music (with an emphasis on Cajun) and various Eastern European, Balkan and Mediterranean musics.

He started Long Gone Sound Productions in 1999. He won a Grammy in 2002 and has been nominated six times in total.